Moonlighting for a Vendor and Donations of Sick Time from Subordinates

There's a lot to learn from the chief of New Orleans' emergency medical service's past conflicts of interest, which have only recently become public. Despite the compassion one must feel for the official, the conflicts were poorly handled by her and by the former mayor and his administration.

According to an article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, in late 2005 the EMS chief endorsed a medical product. A year later, the company that makes this medical product hired away her deputy director, and nine months after that, the chief took a part-time job with the Dallas-area company, which paid her $90,000 on top of her $180,000 government salary, the highest in New Orleans.

According to her, the mayor and the chief administrative officer approved this second job, saying there was no conflict of interest. "I went to my superiors, and I said, 'If you think in any way, shape or form that here is a conflict, I won't do it. They said they saw no conflict of interest."

The principal conflict here involves the ability to do her job. Her employer, and much of her work for it, was in Dallas. As chief of EMS, EMS medical director, medical director for the New Orleans Fire Department, and chief medical officer for the city's Office of Emergency Preparedness in post-Katrina New Orleans, it's hard to believe that, as she said, she "probably could do much of my job by my cell phone and my computer."

But there is also the conflict involved in working for a company that sells devices to the departments she headed or worked for. There is also the appearance of impropriety involved in a city official being given a job offer by a company whose product she had publicly endorsed, as well as a company that had recently hired away her deputy director.

Two months after accepting the second position, the EMS chief was diagnosed with uterine cancer, and began taking chemotherapy in Dallas rather than New Orleans. According to another Times-Picayune article, from last Friday, she said that she arranged "twice-a-day commuter flights so she could receive cancer treatments in the morning and be at her desk in New Orleans by afternoon."

The EMS chief held the two positions and took chemotherapy for another year. She even bought a second home in the Dallas area.

Her most serious unethical conduct, however, was accepting gifts of sick days (legally) from her subordinates. Fifteen subordinates donated 625 hours to her. Clearly, there was great sympathy for her fight with cancer, but this sort of sympathy should come from above, not from below, at least in the form of gifts. The principal problem with accepting gifts from subordinates is the reality or appearance of coercion. There is a secondary problem of employees using such gifts to raise the likelihood of promotion, and the appearance of impropriety that will accompany future promotions. This can seriously undermine the morale in a department.

The City Ethics Model Code, and many ethics codes across the county, have a provision that deals expressly with transactions with subordinates.

A decision to give the EMS chief extra leave time should have come from her boss, and it should have been made in conjunction with limits on her outside work and travel, unless the travel was absolutely necessary and unrelated to the outside work.

This matter became public because employees complained to a local watchdog group, the Metropolitan Crime Commission, that the EMS chief was not showing up at work. The MCC investigated the matter and recently took it to the current New Orleans administration and the state legislative auditor. The results include changes in city policies involving outside employment, and the resignation last week of the EMS chief.

However, although employees are required to sign a form stating that their donation of sick time was not coerced, subordinates are still permitted to donate sick time to their bosses.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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